Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I second this motion. The Square Kilometre Array, being a Western Australian project, is a project that I have been very familiar with over many years. To date it has enjoyed bipartisan support at both a state and a federal level. Certainly, the government that I was a minister of in Western Australia put some very substantial funding towards getting this project up and running. I am pleased to say that that has been continued by the Barnett government.

It is a project that saw very significant investment under the Labor years federally because, as well as having the array, one needs to have the computing facilities that are necessary to allow us to exploit the extraordinary amount of astronomical data that we are receiving. We invested some $80 million in the Pawsey Centre in 2009 for the development of the supercomputing facility. In 2012 we invested some $18.8 million to make sure that Australian firms and research institutes were able to get involved in these SKA projects. It is absolutely fundamental that we provide the capacity for our scientists, for our research institutions and for our industry to leverage into this project. There were a whole variety of private sector companies, including RPC Technologies and Aurecon Australia, that were assisted to get involved, as well as obviously the research outfits—the CSIRO, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and Swinburne University—that were capacitated by this grant of money to ensure that we were part of this project.

The next big hurdle that we are going to meet is the funding that will be required of Australia for us to participate in the next phase of the SKA, the portion of the SKA that has been awarded to Australia. As members would know, it is being divided between Australia and South Africa. Australia's contribution is estimated to be in the order of 100 million euros or, on current exchange rates, probably about $130 million. That will be a contribution that Australia has to make and we hope that we see the federal government being prepared to step up to the plate.

We are a little bit pessimistic because we have seen the $836 million that has been taken out of science and research and development in the current budget, with a cut to the CSIRO alone of $114 million. I am sure the member who moved this motion is very sincere in her commitment to science. Indeed, I believe the Minister for Industry is also committed and I enjoy attending the Parliamentary Friends of Science events with them. But I think we have to do more than just talk the talk. There has to be a preparedness to invest in science and technology, and one can only say, looking at what has happened in the budget this year with $836 million being stripped out of research and development over the next four years, that one cannot be terribly optimistic.

I conclude by saying that the Square Kilometre Array and the projects that are in place now have very much depended on the delivery of the NBN. The delivery of fibre-optic cable up into that Mid West region has not only been a boon for this project but underpinned a huge fluorescence of new technologies in the Geraldton area. That is another very positive spin-off for our community.

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